August 25, 2013

Food You Can't Eat, And Other Cockamamie Peculinarities

Dagwood became a household name not just because he was Blondie's husband (note that she got the billing in the title of the strip) but because of the eponymous skyscraper-stack sandwiches he purports to enjoy. Well, that was a comic, so nobody every really thought Dagwood's dagwoods could be eaten - how could anybody possibly wrap their mouth around them?

But get a load of the "people's burger" dreamed up by some gang of idle food writers at the Washington Post: They took an idiotic concept (selecting the most-popular element from each of a dozen burgers from different restaurants and combining them into one burger) and made it sillier still by stacking the thing a foot high and making it impossible to eat. (They claim they did; I remain unconvinced.) Well, all in fun, I guess. At least I didn't pay for it.

Many restaurants, though, have also got into the game of impractically large, difficult-if-not-impossible-to-eat sandwiches. And then I do mind, because I'm paying for something I'm not getting -- an edible meal. Burger, defined: bun, meat, maybe a bit of lettuce or onion, a condiment or two, and no higher than 2.5 inches.

I'm also highly suspicious of those gargantuan preparations you occassionally see prepared for some commemorative event: The 50,000-egg omelette, for example, or the cherry pie that's a half-mile across. Granted, these aren't meant to be eaten as a single serving, but the problem here, I feel sure, is that something that huge is surely very bad food - a cheesecake that's raw in the middle, or a cake that's pieced together from thousands of individual, separately cooked pieces of cake. No thanks.